King Charles the Martyr

Sermon at the Annual Mass of the Society of King Charles the Martyr

All Saints Church, Ashmont, Boston

January 26, 2013

At the end of Dom Gregory Dix’s classic The Shape of the Liturgy is the famous “purple passage,” beloved of generations of seminarians, which begins with the question: “Was ever another command so obeyed?” After rehearsing the many different settings and circumstances in which Christians have celebrated the Eucharist, Dix notes how it also marks the great turning points in history. His examples include: “Alfred wandering defeated by the Danes staying his soul on this, while medieval England struggled to be born; and Charles I also, on that morning of his execution when medieval England came to its final end.”[1]

Over the years, I’ve wondered what Dix meant by that phrase. In what sense did medieval England come to its final end on the scaffold outside the Banqueting House at Whitehall? Histories of the English Civil War, or the Great Rebellion if you prefer, tend to focus on the religious and political dimensions of the conflict. The strife among Anglicans, Puritans, Presbyterians, and Independents took place in the context of the bloody religious wars of seventeenth century Europe – a world in which the spiritual unity of medieval Christendom no longer obtained. And fighting over such questions as who had the right to raise taxes and command the army, King and Parliament were engaged in a constitutional struggle for control of the administrative apparatus of an early modern state – in a setting where medieval feudalism was a thing of the past.

Yet the conventional histories tend to pass over a third dimension, namely, the social question. The King and his supporters, on one hand, adhered to a traditional vision of society inherited from the Middle Ages. His Puritan opponents, on the other, exhibited very different social attitudes arising from a radically new and distinctively modern mindset. This morning I want to explore the differences between these two world views, and their implications for us today.

The surroundings of this gothic-revival church of All Saints remind us that one hallmark of Western Catholic identity is reverence and respect for the Middle Ages. The leaders of the nineteenth-century Anglo-Catholic revival – from the Tractarians John Henry Newman, John Keble, and Edward Bouverie Pusey, to the novelist Charlotte Yonge, to the slum priests Charles Lowder and Alexander Herriot Mackonochie – looked back on the medieval world as embodying a more just and Christian society than their own; and by more than a coincidence they also venerated King Charles as a model Christian ruler.

Medieval social thought drew on the Bible, the Fathers, the Scholastic theologians, and the canon lawyers. Its most basic assumption was that the Christian faith supplies a moral standard for all human institutions and activities. And it saw society as an organism composed of an array of different classes of people unified by a web of reciprocal obligations, duties, and rights. It is sometimes claimed that the idea of human rights is an invention of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment; but this is not true. Rights were well known to medieval canon and civil law. The difference was that they generally attached to groups rather than to individuals. If you were a noble, you shared in the rights belonging to your class; if you were a monk, you shared in the rights belonging to your abbey; if you were a craftsman, you shared in the rights belonging to your guild. Corresponding to all these rights was a comprehensive set of duties and obligations towards other groups and towards society at large. Other people’s rights constituted your duties, and vice versa. If you were a knight, for example, you had a duty to protect and defend the Church; but you also had a right to the Church’s prayers for your soul in return.

At its worst, this vision of social order was hierarchical, paternalistic, and marked by gross inequality. Yet, while everyone was expected to know his place, there was at least a place for everyone. Even peasants enjoyed definite rights in return for service to their lords – most notably the right to equitable access to the land to raise sufficient crops and livestock for subsistence and survival after paying their rents.

Moreover, under the guidance of the Church, an ethic of mutual responsibility and care pervaded the entire social organism, extending even to beggars. A great social gulf may have been fixed between “the rich man in his castle, and the poor man at his gate,”[2] but on the basis of such Gospel texts as the parable of Dives and Lazarus,[3] the rich man understood that his eternal salvation depended on ensuring that the poor man did not starve to death. The greatest saints of the Middle Ages were known for their generosity to the poor, not only in individual almsgiving but also in the founding of hostels, hospitals, and orphanages.

          By the 1600s, this organic social vision had come under extreme pressure from changing political and economic conditions. Nevertheless, the government of King Charles I did its best to perpetuate the best social ideals inherited from the Middle Ages: particularly by upholding the notion of the common good over and against a rising tide of economic individualism. In one of his sermons, Archbishop William Laud remarked: “If any be so addicted to his private, that he neglect the common state, he is void of the sense of piety, and wisheth peace and happiness to himself in vain.”[4]

          Yet private interests were asserting themselves vigorously. A prime example was the accelerating pace of agricultural enclosures. Stimulated by the burgeoning wool trade, landowners discovered that they could vastly increase profits by evicting their peasants, and giving over what had previously been commons to sheep-grazing and grain production. However, acting through such judicial bodies as the Star Chamber, the king’s ministers – notably Archbishop Laud himself – vigorously defended the rights of tenants whose landlords were trying unjustly to evict them.

          Despite the government’s efforts, however, the enclosures proceeded apace, creating new populations of displaced persons destitute of any lawful means of earning a living. The Tudor and early Stuart governments realized that purely private charity was no longer adequate to address this situation, and enacted a series of Poor Laws designed to provide employment for those willing to work, and relief for those unable to work. In Charles’ reign, work houses for the able-bodied poor were to be established in every parish, administered by the churchwardens and funded by tithes.

          In economic policy, Charles’s government attempted to regulate industry and commerce by means of patents and monopolies. At its worst, this system became an instrument of favoritism and a means of raising money for the Crown in the absence of a sitting Parliament. At its best, however, it represented a sincere if clumsy effort to promote the common good through just wages, fair prices, and high employment.

Charles’s love of the arts reminds us that the common good has a cultural and aesthetic dimension as well. Although his tastes were baroque and not gothic, Charles’s patronage of painters and architects witnessed in a thoroughly medieval way against the stark utilitarianism of the Puritans who condemned such pursuits as so much frivolity. More than two centuries later, the Arts and Crafts Movement, so well represented in this church building, sought to counter the dehumanizing effects of mechanization and assembly-line production by encouraging designers and artists to create handcrafted objects of beauty.

          The Puritans were driven by a radically different social vision. Although both Royalists and Puritans were to be found at all levels of society, contemporary writers remarked that Puritanism found its greatest support among what were then called “the middle sort of men” – neither nobles and aristocrats, nor peasants and manual laborers, but merchants, craftsmen, members of the professions, and the rural gentry – those whom we describe today as the Middle Classes.

The Puritan social ethic was one of economic individualism and self-reliance. In its doctrine of double-predestination, Calvinist theology taught that before the foundation of the world God had fore-ordained every individual to either eternal salvation or eternal damnation. The burning question, then, was how one might know that one was among the elect. Certain strands of Calvinism had come up with the answer that economic and material prosperity in the pursuit of one’s calling was the surest sign of God’s favor. At the same time, Puritanism condemned all luxury, idleness, and conspicuous consumption. Thus, through a disciplined life of hard work, frugality, and the shunning of worldly pleasures, the Puritan merchant or businessman sought to glorify God and assure himself of his own salvation.

Those imbued with this ethos chafed under the restrictions of a royal government that sought to put the common good of society above the individual interests of private entrepreneurs. Among its first actions, the Long Parliament of 1640 dismantled the government’s economic system of monopolies and patents. Later, during the Interregnum, the government of Oliver Cromwell attempted to legislate with a vengeance what we would today call private morality – banning such activities as plays, dancing, and public drunkenness. But it abandoned all efforts to regulate business and commercial activity according to any principles of social ethics. From the 1650s on, the idea gained traction in England that the conduct of business should be left in the hands of businessmen, unimpeded by the meddling of clergy or other agents of an obsolete social morality. Henceforth, the free market would reign unchallenged. The restoration of the monarchy in 1660 did little to reverse this trend.

The greatest change of all, perhaps, involved attitudes to wealth and poverty. During the Middle Ages, the accumulation of personal wealth subjected individuals to the suspicion that they had grown rich unjustly at the expense of their neighbors. Excessive riches were seen as a spiritual snare, a source of temptation to the sins of pride and avarice – the best remedy for which was liberal generosity and almsgiving to the poor. But, under the influence of Puritanism, in seventeenth-century England a precisely opposite attitude emerged that regarded great wealth as the surest sign of God’s approval, and poverty as evidence of a flawed and degenerate character. The sufferings of the poor were their deserved punishment for sins of idleness, self-indulgence, laziness, and licentiousness. According to this mindset, the truest charity was not to relieve the poor but to discipline them. Working hours should be kept long, prices high, and wages low in order to teach the poor the virtues of thrift, and to prevent them from squandering their earnings in weekly drunken debauches.

          Against such attitudes, the early twentieth-century British economic historian R.H. Tawney wrote: “A society which reverences the attainment of riches as the supreme felicity will naturally be disposed to regard the poor as damned in the next world, if only to justify itself for making their life a hell in this.”[5] A bit further on he commented: “there is no touchstone, except the treatment of childhood, which reveals the true character of a social philosophy more clearly than the spirit in which it regards the misfortunes of those of its members who fall by the way.”[6]

          Against this background, we can begin to appreciate the full significance of the beheading of King Charles on January 30, 1649 as more momentous than even the crime and sin of regicide. In its constitutional dimension, it represented the severing of the head of state from the body politic; and in its social dimension it signaled the final unraveling of the web of mutual relationships and reciprocal obligations that had bound English society together for centuries. Henceforth, it would be everyone for oneself. It is in this sense, I believe, that we discover the fullest meaning of Gregory Dix’s remark that medieval England came to its final end on the scaffold outside Whitehall.

          We can fittingly memorialize King Charles by taking another look at the medieval social vision by which he lived and died. Too often, those committed to traditionalism in religion and orthodoxy in theology unthinkingly assume a conservative social agenda to be part of the same package. Ironically, however, contemporary social conservatism tends to have far more in common with the Puritan ethos of the regicides than with the medieval ethos of the Royal Martyr. For example, in 1987 Prime Margaret Thatcher revealed herself a true heir of seventeenth-century Puritanism when she remarked that: “there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families …”[7]

It doesn’t have to be this way. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Reformed theology rediscovered the Church’s traditional social teaching, and sought to apply it to the changing conditions of the modern world. The result has been described as a third way that avoids the extremes of both laissez-faire capitalism and Marxist communism, and finds its classic expression in the great social encyclicals of the Popes beginning with Rerum Novarum of Leo XIII in 1891, as well as in the thought of such Anglican writers as Frederick Denison Maurice, Henry Scott Holland, Charles Gore, Stuart Headlam, and William Temple.

We do well to study and re-appropriate this legacy of Catholic social teaching. With its emphasis on the common good, fair prices, just wages, an equitable distribution of wealth, and care for the ecological commons of the earth, it carries forward today many of the same principles that King Charles and Archbishop Laud tried to defend, at the cost of their lives, against the rising tide of bourgeois economic individualism in the seventeenth century.

By trying to point the way to a more just society on earth, the Church does not turn its back on spiritual realities, but rather bears witness to its hope of heaven. There, together with all the angels and saints, King Charles the Martyr now reigns in glory with his Lord and ours, having exchanged a corruptible for an incorruptible crown, and enjoying the peace of that kingdom where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the world.

Bibliographical Note

This sermon draws key ideas from Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-5), especially as developed and refined in R.H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926). Also helpful was Margaret James, Social Problems and Policy during the Puritan Revolution (1930). A critique of the Weber thesis is found in Kurt Samuelsson, Religion and Economic Action (1957).

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[1] Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London: A&C Black, 1945), 745.

[2] Omitted from most contemporary hymnals, the third verse of “All things bright and beautiful,” by Cecil Frances Alexander, reads: “The rich man in his castle, / The poor man at his gate, / God made them high and lowly, / and ordered their estate.” Hymns Ancient and Modern, New and Revised Edition (London: William Clowes, 1906), Hymn 573.

[3] St. Luke 16:19-31.

[4] Quoted in R.H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1926), 172.

[5] Tawney, 267.

[6] Tawney, 268. 

[7] A transcript of the interview in which Thatcher made this remark can be found at http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689.